Victoria's Self Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation, and Empire

Victoria's Self Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation, and Empire

Queen Victoria's name is used to identify an era. Over her long reign the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe. The birth of photography, and an explosion in print culture and the press, allowed her image to touch its furthest reaches. Her image, painted and sculpted, still dominates public spaces scattered throughout every continent. However, narratives of Victoria’s life tended to set her up as a curiously inert figure, detached from public life and politics. This project challenged these orthodoxies by examining Victoria as a pro-active political agent in the construction of an image for nineteenth century monarchy, and therefore directly implicated in what would become the Queen Victoria phenomenon.
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    Introduction: Victoria’s Self-Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation, and Empire
    (2022-02-28)
    Hatt, Michael
    ;
    Marschner, Joanna
    This introduction sets out the structure and contents of this issue of 19: ‘Victoria’s Self-Fashioning: Curating the Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation, and Empire’.
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    Shaping Royal Image through Repurposed Royal Residences in the Late Nineteenth Century: Queen Victoria’s Museum at Kensington Palace
    (2022-02-28)
    Marschner, Joanna
    On Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday, 24 May 1899, the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, the Queen’s childhood home, opened to public visitors. As the nineteenth century drew towards its end, and aware of her own mortality, the restoration of the palace and the representation of the State Apartments provided an opportunity for the Queen, as a proactive curator, to construct a visual narrative of her reign and signal the relationship she sought between monarch and subject within spaces redolent with and conditioned by her life narrative. With the Queen’s encouragement, and under the aegis of Liberal politician and courtier Lord Esher, paintings and other artefacts were gathered to position her within the royal lineage and international dynastic networks. They celebrate her reign as the culmination of nineteenth-century British imperial ambition, and reflect and recast her personal history. The nature of the re-presentation of the State Apartments at Kensington Palace and the impact they had on early visitors is compared to the visitor experience at Osborne House, another royal home closely associated with the Queen’s history, which opened to public visitors following a state-managed restoration shortly after the Queen’s death.
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    Item type:Journal article,
    Forum: Victoria and the Politics of Representation
    (2022-09-02)
    Hatt, Michael
    ;
    Marschner, Joanna
    ;
    Hunt, Tristram
    ;
    Sengupta, Jayanta
    ;
    Venne, Sharon H.
    Seven contemporary commentators whose experience has been touched by Queen Victoria’s history and its legacy address the question: how should we curate Victoria today?
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